Oliver Toussaint Jackson established Dearfield, a black agricultural colony on the arid high plains in Colorado on May 5, 1910. Jackson got the support of the Colorado chapter of the National Negro Business League, but the group withdrew their support after Booker T. Washington, the national president, refused to endorse the settlement.  After being unable to acquire another financial backer for the project Jackson and a few families started the settlement on their own.

During the first winter in Dearfield only two of the seven families “had wooden houses and the suffering was intense” according to Jackson. He said “buffalo chips and sagebrush was our chief fuel. Three of our horses died from starvation and the other three were too weak to pull the empty wagon.”

Then by 1915 Dearfield had gone from only seven families living in tents, dugouts and caves in the hillside to twenty-seven families living in wooden cabins.  The next five years would see the settlement grow to a population of seventy with their own school, restaurant, grocery store, boarding house, and two churches.

By the end of World War I in 1918 brought an end to the settlement’s growth. As the demand for their crops dropped the families started to default on their mortgages and equipment loans. One by one the families sold their farms until there were only twelve people living in Dearfield in 1940. The last resident was Jackson’s niece Jenny Jackson, lived there until her death in 1973.

Source: 

Hill, S. (2007, May 23). Dearfield, Colorado. BlackPast.org. https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/dearfield-colorado/

Read more:

Black correction officer mistaken for shoplifter files lawsuit against Walmart for ‘racial profiling’

Video footage shows lunchroom aide made a Black child eat food out of cafeteria trash

Georgia pastor and his wife arrested after eight people are found allegedly ‘imprisoned’ in the basement